This paper describes the status and directions of the emerging ISO/IEC JPEG-2000 image compression coding standard. This new work item of the Joint Photographic Expert Group (JPEG) 2000 is intended to create a unified coding standard for different types of still images (bilevel, gray-level, color) with different characteristics (natural, medical, remote sensing, text). The paper presents an overview of the various aspects of JPEG-2000 and highlights new functionalities supported by this emerging standard and its potential applications. Experimental results are shown to illustrate its performance.